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Seven Strategies for Attracting and Retaining Top IT Talent

January 04, 2007 — CIO —

By David Reff

Wouldn’t it be great to start the New Year armed with award-winning IT organizations’ best practices for attracting and retaining top talent?

If your answer isn’t a resounding yes, consider this your wake-up call. According to Business 2.0 magazine, for every two baby boomers who retire in the next decade, there will only be one college grad to take their place. “The challenge [for IT managers] is going to be getting candidates in the door and hanging onto them,” says former Northwestern Mutual Life VP of IT Phil Zwieg, given what he calls the “abysmal” enrollment in college IT programs.

The IT departments that effectively support and enable their companies in the next decade will be—pure and simple—the ones that have enough of the best people. Those that fall behind will do so because they underestimated the competitiveness of what many economists predict to be the most intensive war for talent in the history of American business.

Over the next decade, your career will hinge on your ability to attract and retain top-notch IT professionals. Your success in doing so carries an additional bonus: It helps you stand out as a top candidate for IT management opportunities down the road. Below are seven tactics for winning the talent war.

1.         Go for it!

Winning the war for talent requires pursuing the best and the brightest with relentless determination. “Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking we’re just interviewing people, and they have to sell us [on themselves],” says Bob Prosen, author of the book Kiss Theory Good Bye. In truth, you need to sell prospective candidates—especially the hottest ones—on your organization.

Todd Lunsford, the CIO of Quicken Loans, says his senior executives aren’t shy about personally following up with top prospects. After all, nothing makes an impression on a candidate like getting a personal call from the employer’s top brass. “I’ve had the CEO or chairman contact people if we [IT managers] feel we haven’t done a good enough job of selling them on our culture,” he says. The devotion of Quicken Loans’ senior executives to pursuing top talent is one reason why the Livonia, Mich.-based company’s offer acceptance rates are so high, at 80 percent.

2.         Offer challenging work that matters

Sonja Nelson, who built world-class software development teams for BMC and Neon Enterprise Software, knows what it takes to court the industry’s best. After all, she’s hired more than a hundred of them in her multidecade career. “If they’re really talented, there’s no point in giving them ordinary, day-to-day work,” she notes. “They want to be the architects, not the bricklayers.” So don’t wait until your best people have left to find out they were bored. Challenge them with important initiatives. Then watch them rise to the occasion.

 

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